Court case against SS medic accused of helping kill 3,681 people at Auschwitz to be thrown out

Defendant's dementia leads to collapse of long-awaited trial

Mr Zafke's defence team said he suffered from poor health, including dementia, high blood pressure and suicidal thoughts (BERND WUSTNECK / Getty)

A case against a 96-year-old former SS medic is set to be thrown out after prosecutors said he was unfit to stand trial.

Hubert Zafke was accused of helping to kill 3,681 people at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in a period of several weeks in 1944.

Mr Zafke's defence team argued that he did nothing criminal and said he should not stand trial because he suffered from poor health, including dementia, high blood pressure and suicidal thoughts.

The prosecutors' office in Schwerin said on Thursday that Mr Zafke was examined by experts twice in recent months and found to be unfit.

Stefan Urbanek, a spokesman for the regional prosecutor's office, told AFP: "Now the dementia has reached a severity that the defendant is no longer able, inside and outside the courtroom, to reasonably assess his interests or coherently follow or give testimony."

The court case, which started in February 2016 in Neubrandenburg, has been paused three times because of concerns about Mr Zafke's health.

Three judges were removed from the trial in June after lawyers representing Auschwitz victims and their families complained of bias.

The International Auschwitz Committee, which represents Holocaust survivors, previously accused the German prosecutors of "complete disinterest” in reaching a judgement.

But a lawyer for the two plaintiffs, who are sons of a woman murdered in Auschwitz, said the new decision to throw out the court case "complied with the rule of law".

Some 1.1 million people died between 1940 and 1945 in Auschwitz before it was liberated by Soviet soldiers.

More than 70 years after the most senior members of the Third Reich were prosecuted at Nuremberg, Germany is struggling to prosecute the last members of the Nazi regime.

Recent trials have used a new standard of evidence, which says that anyone working at a death camp can be prosecuted, regardless of whether they were proven to have murdered specific individuals.